How to Handle Code Review Dependencies

PO – Hello, how are you doing today?

SM – I am good, Thank you. How about you?

PO – I am also good, wanted to discuss few observations regarding team.

SM – Yes, please go ahead.

PO – Last few sprints I have been seeing that team is not able to complete stories committed in sprint plan. Looks like team is facing some challenges. What do you think?

Code Review

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SM – Yes, you are right. Team is having dependency for code reviews on some other team. Team getting code reviews very late in the sprint. Sometimes they are not getting reviews in sprint timeline itself, hence stories are getting spilled over to next sprint.

PO –It’s really a challenge for team, as these reviewers are not from our team. Also, they are working on PRs for multiple teams, so not sure what priority they have for our team and how much time they can dedicate for us. Have you tried finding any work around for this?

SM – Yes, we discussed this issue in our retro this time. We are planning to set a call with code review team. We will explain our situation to them and try to find out how they can help us. Also suggested team on doing right sizing for stories. Suggested them to follow INVEST while refining stories and try to have smaller stories planned for sprint.

As we are following scrum and 2 weeks sprint, team can plan stories of small size which can be completed in first week and next week can be kept for code reviews, bug fixes and any other release activities. May be after discussing with code review team will get more clarity on how much maximum time we can expect for code reviews and based on that we can plan our stories also.

PO – Looks like a good plan. Please let me know if I can help on something.

SM – Sure, Thanks a lot.